Practical Theories?

Translated by Aileen Derieg

Ruth Sonderegger

“The
chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism […] is that the thing,reality,
sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of
contemplation,but not as sensuous human activity, practice.”(Karl Marx,
1st Thesis on Feuerbach)

In reference
to Bourdieu’s theory of praxis, the question that always seemed to me to be
both the most interesting and the most difficult is whether Bourdieu is not
only a theorist of praxis, but also a practician of theory. Or to phrase it in
the terms of Marx’ Theses on Feuerbach, the first of which Bourdieu placed
above his Outline of a
Theory of Practice[1] as a motto:
does Bourdieu’s theory only analyze and interpret, or does it also change
something? The following considerations center around this question. In
conclusion, I want to propose a few conjectures about why the Bourdieu
theory-praxis complex ultimately refers to aesthetic strategies that
specifically do not occur where he makes art fields – for instance, the field
of literature, photography or of the museum – the object of sociological
research.

Theory of Praxis

What is so
special about praxis theories? Are they not the most obvious, especially for a
social scientist? Particularly in the social sciences and humanities, it is not
at all self-evident to analyze human activity on the basis of everyday
practices and the concomitant sens pratique, which has
entered into the German-speaking discussion – easily misunderstood – as “social
sense”.[2] According
to the thesis of the praxis theory, with this sens pratique we can even
precisely navigate and participate where it is impossible to explicate or even
defend the rules of a praxis. If we follow this thesis, then the categories of
action and the actor that are so fundamental and apparently inconspicuous are
shaken. These categories specifically impute an intentionality that has become
taken for granted as the measure of the conscious and the known. In light of
this measure, all other agency must be assessed as pre- or subconscious.

Bourdieu
already protests against this at the terminological level by consistently using
the word “agent” rather than “actor” or “subject”, which indicates those taking
action, who are always alsodelegates taking action on behalf of others. We need only
recall how long actions were analyzed by sociology and philosophy as being
instrumentally rational or guided by explicit norms[3], in order
to understand what a radical step that was. By localizing the foundation of
intentional action in socialized habits of thinking, wanting, moving and
sensing, Bourdieu turns the relationships around: intentional action is based
on regulated behavior, to which we have no knowing access, although we are
virtually physically familiar with the norms that are established or passed on
in this way – or to be more precise: we live and are these norms. At the same
time, following Bourdieu, questioning individual possibilities of choice does
not mean that everything is left up to chance or that the age of
purposelessness has come, which is especially invoked in the art context. The
central terms of Bourdieu’s philosophy of praxis, “field” and “habitus”[4], provide an
ingenious instrument to be able to analyze human action as being neither random
nor absolutely determined even where agents neither choose the rules nor are
able to justify them.

The
thoroughly bodily rules stored in the sens pratique are hard to
criticize, because they cannot be named without taking a great distance. And if
they may be seized and explicated, they present themselves in the appearance of
the natural and legitimate. The way it is, appears to be good. This insight is
found in the philosophical theory of praxis in a trusting view and in a
cultural pessimism view. It is no wonder that half of the praxis philosophers –
Wittgenstein is their most prominent representative – became quietist and, in
the course of defending the fundamental position of familiar modes of action
against rationalist understandings of action, came to the conclusion that the
familiar way is the right way. Heidegger, on the other hand, who represents the
second fraction, claims that the human being is by definition a fallen being of
the masses, imitating others, never able to escape the sphere of man; in other
words, a kind of original sin theory adapted to praxis theory.

Praxis of Theory I

Bourdieu is
only marginally interested in the triviality that the human being is a creature
of habit,which Wittgenstein and Heidegger had placed in the center,
and without condescendingly lookingdown on the creatures
thus described. For Bourdieu, in its generality this triviality is only the
starting point for investigating very specific normalized rules. Instead of
saying what belongs to human action as such, Bourdieu reconstructs normed
habits specific to groups and classes, thus calling attention to three points:
it is much more important than the all-too-human fact that habits structure us,
to find out which different social norms there are in one and the same field,
what the factors are that determine the boundaries between these different
social behaviors, and which have the greatest impact and why. This is, for
instance, the result of the museum study by Bourdieu and Darbel[5], that the
family environment is much more important than school in the question of who
goes to the museum as an adult; yet influences from school are more lasting
than educational programs on the part of the museums; that the accessibility of
museums in Poland functions differently than in the Netherlands or in France.
In other words, from the beginning Bourdieu was interested in the factors that
lead to different normalities in one and the same social field and in the power
relations between these different normalities. At the same time, the fact that
Bourdieu investigated certain fields of praxis and not others is like a
judgment: specifically that explicating the game rules is necessary in these
places, because the appearance of being natural has settled itself here
obstinately and with structural violence.

This is also
a first answer to the question of the extent to which Bourdieu’s praxis theory
intervenes in the practices he analyzes and is thus also a praxis of theory. It
is one thing to refer to certain practices as an illustration of theoretical
insights and then present examples that are as spectacular as possible or even
completely detached[6], to make an
all too general point of the philosophy of praxis more entertaining. It is
something completely different, though, if one wants to find out, like
Bourdieu, for whom it is a rule to take part in a guided tour in a museum, and
who disdains these kinds of events as a service for proletarians and those
ignorant of art. Yet it is not only the case that Bourdieu is not interested in
the fundamental difference between explicit knowledge and implicit rules,
between know how and know that. Self-reflexive as no other praxis theorist, he
also considered the class-specific wayof dealing with this
difference. Hence, his Pascalian Meditations[7] are devoted
to the genesis of scholastic reason. The latter was always more perfectly
specialized in the explication of know how, in transforming know how into know
that, and additionally ensured that this special ability, increasingly
contemptuous of the world, presupposing leisure and economic independence, was
furnished with a great deal of cultural and symbolic capital.

Praxis of Theory II

The praxis
theory is not without its problems, even if one seeks to practice it
site-specifically, or more precisely field-specifically and in keeping with
power theory in Bourdieu’s manner, instead of leaving it in the realm of the
generally human. Inherent to the theory of the unknowingly mastered rules is
not only the danger of quietism, but also of an elitist, structuralist ideology
critique. This kind of ideology critique encroaches, when reason that has
become sociologically or anthropologically scholastic purports to be able to
say everything about the rules of those who blindly act according to them; and
when, on top of that, this reason evinces no interest in intervening in this
blindness, but stoically looks down on it. This problem is not unfamiliar to
Bourdieu either, who had reason to take leave of his initial structuralism in
favor of a praxeology that has to do with mediating the participant perspective
with the observer perspective.

Bourdieu did
not arrive at this result purely out of the goodness of his heart, but rather
because he was self-critical enough to see which dimensions of practices he
could not explain with a structuralist program that was too narrow.[8]
Structuralist observer sociology, which seeks to cancel out the participant
perspective entirely, is too little sensitive to the strategic use of given
rules in relation to a situation; it also forgets that its academic standpoint
of breaking with the participant perspective is also only a standpoint.
Bourdieu reacts to this with the demand to break with the break.[9] With this,
he turns against the elite position of the social scientist who wants to construct
rules that the actors have no conscious idea of. The social scientist magician,
who is able to decipher secret laws of action, is superseded by the
self-reflexive sociologist. She/he takes responsibility for their own being
embeddedin both the everyday and the theoretical practices of
analyzing. And she/he afterward endeavors to negotiate between the first step
of breaking with the social world and the limitations of her/his inevitable
participation.

The
question, however, is whether Bourdieu ever found a satisfactory solution for
negotiating the two so very different perspectives, that of the participant and
that of the observer, of distance and engagement. For to begin with, it appears
that either the sociologist must become a distanceless participant, or that the
reflection on the observer perspective only doubles it. Either would
respectively obliterate the other perspective.[10] And this
would mean that with the self-reflexive objectification of sociological
distancing, anything like engagement would be just as little achieved as with
the – no matter how enlightened the intention – explicated hidden pattern of
agency. Yet even with this kind of enlightenment enlightened about itself, the
structures that are revealed are still not changed, and most of all, no attempt
has been made to provide those analyzed with tools to make this insight
utilizable for themselves. It is one thing to say with Proust, quoted by
Bourdieu, that “arms and legs are full of hidden imperatives”[11]. It is an
entirely different question, which rules are to be expelled from the arms and
legs and where they might be made to dance.

Praxis of Theory III

This
difference between engagement and enlightenment can be explained[12] with the
explicating or critical way of dealing with the amateur photography of the
petit bourgeois and proletarian photo albums by Bourdieu on the one hand[13] and by the
photographer Jo Spence[14] on the
other. Bourdieu analyzes the album photos to reconstruct social rules of the
lower class, which would hardly be mentioned in a sociological interview. His
procedure turns those analyzed into actors and experts and presents a defense
of amateur photography as an art moyen at the same time. In comparison, Spencegoes a step
further. In the investigation of her own family album, she shows that visual
constructions can be more revealing than those verbally articulated, where
implicit social rules are involved. To this extent she is in accordance with
Bourdieu as an anthropologist of the visual. In addition, however, and logically
continuing her research of working class photography, she undertakes the
attempt to critique the function and aesthetics of amateur photography using
the concrete example of her own family album, and to invent new album rules. In
this respect, she leaves Bourdieu far behind.

In The Weight of the World[15], however,
and in several later (interview) statements, Bourdieu at least enters into the
proximity of engaged analysis practices like Spence's. The Weight of the World is more
than just the publication of interview material, such as that which exists and
could just as well have been published for Bourdieu's earlier studies. This
interview material, published in a prominent position and in an unusual amount,
and especially because of the serial composition without a conclusion (which
brings me to aesthetic rhetorical strategies of social research), it has a
practical, namely utilizable, added value. It has this value for those
interviewed, because the conversations devote an unusual amount of attention to
them, specifically so that no inexistent hopes, desires and alternatives become
manifest, where one tends to see only patronized, passivized and, if possible,
spectacular misery. For the interviewees, in many cases the interviews
obviously also have the character of a self-explanation and self-presentation.
Specifically where the conversations become symmetrical in the sense that the
interviewees (learn to) take over the questioning and sometimes even the
distanced sociological view, it leads to a new appraisal of one’s own problems
as being not so entirely one’s own. These kinds of self-experiences are not
(only) disillusioning in the sense of an elitist ideology critique, but rather
– on the contrary – sometimes even liberating. It is not my intention to gloss
over the problems of The
Weight of the World in this way – especially not in terms of the selection of
people to be interviewed and the lack of background information about their
social context, which sometimes results in a peculiar auratization of the
individual[16].

This brings
me to the use value for the readers. Unlike the usefulness for those
interviewed, which is primarily due to Bourdieu’s reflection and critique of
existing interview methods, the readers profit from the aesthetic qualities of
representation. Whereas for the interviewees, the experiences and desires of
their neighbors or the social constellation they belong to are only
sporadically addressed, for the readers of the book this open totality, which
can neither be reduced to a statistical average nor understood as an argument
for singular experience, is foregrounded. The strange totality is due to both
the way the conversation is conducted and – even more so – to the serial
composition of the interviews. In comparison with other studies by Bourdieu,
this means that the (undoubtedly illuminating) statements and prognoses about
the probability of which desires and interests one will have in a certain
social location, are augmented in Weight of the World by the
enactment of old, yet still topical ideology critical question of when one’s
desires are really one’s own, and whether they can be distinguished from
compulsions.

It is
probably not a coincidence that Bourdieu was working on his book about Flaubert[17] and the
interviews for The
Weight of the World at the same time. And it is certainly even less of a
coincidence that Bourdieu referred more and more frequently at this time to the
French society novel, Karl Kraus, Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek[18]. Whereas
with Kraus, Bernhard and Jelinek he highlighted techniques of irony and humor
and regretted that he had not been able to achieve something similar in
sociology, with the French novels he emphasized their power of analysis and
insight into social structures. Again and again, he stressed Flaubert’s dictum,
which was especially important for social science, that in art the commonplace,
the banal, the mediocre and the insignificant should be taken as seriously as
that which is acknowledged in distinction and dignity. It is in this literary strategy,
which is not only an argument for the break with the participant perspective,
but also at least as much the opposite, that distance and engagement meet in
such a way that is hardly – if at all – possible in the conventional kinds of
publications of sociological investigations: Flaubert’s strategy leaves equally
as much space for each individual case and depotentiates it in
its uniqueness, especially in combination with the serialization technique.
This appears to me to be the compositional principle of the interview project
on the Weight
of the World. It is obvious, however, that visual strategies play no
role in this. Although Bourdieu may be an anthropologist or sociologist of the visual,
his analyses and engagements do not work with the visual. Neither
did Bourdieu ever use his own photos from the time in Algeria (1955-1960) in a
way analogous to the Weight
of the World, i.e. in a montage, nor did he focus on other visual
strategies of analysis or even engagement later. An inkling of what a visual interview
composition in the Flaubert-Bourdieu sense could look like, is suggested, in my
opinion, by Kultug Ataman’s “Küba”.[19]

“Küba”

The video
installation “Küba” is comprised of forty television sets on stands assembled
in a room, each with an armchair in front of it. On the monitors, in the
simultaneity of a confusion of voices, forty inhabitants of the Istanbul
neighborhood of “Küba” are heard, whereby the spatial arrangement of the
monitors only makes it possible to really follow one interview at a time. The
interviews marginally revolve repeatedly around the question of what defines
“Küba” – and keywords are mentioned, such as Kurdish community, being
politically leftist or communist, Cuba, a staunch social cohesion never
experienced elsewhere, petty crime, permanent violence internally and even
stronger from outside. Ultimately, however, all of this proves to be secondary
in comparison with the question of how the individuals cope with their lives
that are endangered on all sides. What is repeated in the stories of these
lives is an oppressive violence – between the sexes, the generations, but most
of all between the inside and the outside of this urban district – with a
simultaneous and paradoxical insistence on Küba as the epitome of home and
solidarity. An image emerges of a social periphery, which the great majority of
Turkish society, to which the Küba portrait complexly says no, wants nothing to
do with – except in the form of police intervention.

Similarly to
The
Weight of the World, “Küba” differs from sociological surveys on issues of
social dissatisfaction, initially in that no conclusions are drawn, no
generalizations or prognoses are made. The length and extensiveness of the
published interviews, which assume the form of monologue stories due to the
restraint of the interviewer – in both “Küba” and in The Weight of the World – also
marks a difference from the conventional formats of social research. Yet the
installation character of “Küba” adds something crucial to the linear reading
experience that The
Weight of the World requires: the permanent acoustic and spatial presence of
all those interviewed. In this way, the social context is always present and
de-auratizes the existentialism of the individual stories, which are not
without problems particularly in Bourdieu’s study.

A Different (View of) Art

Bourdieu not only inspired
artists, but was also at least as much inspired by artistic strategies,
although rarely in visual or spatial aspects. In light of his excessive
photographing at the beginning of his work as a social scientist in Algeria,
this is just as surprising as in light of his thoughts on social spatiality.
Yet I find it even more surprising that for a long time Bourdieu was interested
in art mainly as stakes and currency on the playing field of power.[20] On the other hand, he paid no attention to the
enlightening, the subversive and even the engaged sides of art until into the
1990s.[21] This means that for a long time, he did not take
aesthetic techniques seriously as possibilities for insight.[22] Where he actually did so in the end, this was limited
to admiration for some artists. Even for the most reflexive of all praxis
theorists, it was obviously not possible – at least not for a long time – to
play with the coercions of social science rationalism and to challenge them
with the scientificality of art. This is probably due to the academic field
itself and may have been exacerbated by Bourdieu’s split position in it.

[1]Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1977.

[3]Cf. e.g.: Andreas Reckwitz,
“Toward a Theory of Social Practices. A Development in Culturalist Theorizing”,
in: European Journal of Social Theory,
5, 2002, p. 243-263.

[4]“Habitus” is not to be taken
as a closed system of rules, but rather as schemata that provide certain
possibilities, specifically in an endless diversity that cannot be anticipated.
On the relationship between habitus and field, cf. also Pierre Bourdieu / Loïq
J.D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive
Sociology, Chicago University Press 1992, p.126 ff. and: Beate Krais /
Gunter Gebauer, Habitus, Bielefeld
2002.

[6]For instance, Theodore R.
Schatzki writes (with reference to Bourdieu) in his classic work of praxis
theory, The Site of the Social. A
Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change,
Pennsylvania University Press 2002, p. XVIII: “As stated, I defend my social
ontology through descriptions of empirical phenomena that illustrate and lend
it plausibility. Two examples, in particular, are developed in the following,
both in great detail: the medicinal herb business of the Shaker village of New
Lebanon, New York, in the mid-nineteenth century, and contemporary day trading
on the Nasdaq market.”

[8]In The Logic of Practice, op.cit, he refers to the study “The Kabyle
House or the World Reversed”, which was strongly influenced by Levi-Strauss, as
his “last work as an unselfconscious structuralist”. According to Bourdieu,
structuralist sociology misunderstands the temporal structure of the observed
practices, because it is too strongly fixed on the opus operatum, the product
of praxis, instead of on the course it takes.